On a chilly December morning in 2025, two figures were found floating in Table Bay Harbour. One was a man who had sadly passed away, but a small child, though very cold, was pulled from the water alive. This shocking discovery led to a big police investigation, especially since a child was involved. Rescuers worked quickly, with divers braving the dark, murky water to save the boy. Now, detectives are working hard to understand how this tragedy happened and if there’s a link between the man and the child.
On December 4, 2025, a silent alarm led to the discovery of an adult male’s body and a hypothermic child drifting in Table Bay’s Duncan Docks. The child was rescued, but the adult was pronounced dead. This incident triggered a significant police investigation due to the involvement of a minor.
On the fourth morning of December 2025, Table Bay’s Duncan Docks paused its usual roar. Sunrise painted the sky a washed-out apricot and stretched shadows between the container towers when a long-shore worker spotted two shapes drifting in the narrow lane of water between a moored bulk-grain ship and the steel quay. One figure floated motionless; the other stirred only when a swell rolled through. By 07:15 the port control room had broadcast a Code Red. Eight minutes later the first NSRI rescue pick-up blasted past the security boom, siren half-drowned by the metallic clatter of ships grinding against fenders.
What unfolded next looked like a drill everyone hoped they would never need. Paramedics strung a makeshift triage line while two NSRI swimmers rolled backwards off a pilot boat into 14 °C water the colour of tarnished copper. Visibility was nil; Duncan Docks is infamous for diesel-stained silt that turns daylight dives into blind grope searches. Working by touch alone, the first diver broke surface hugging a small child in a lime-green tee. The second stayed down, sweeping an imaginary grid until his glove brushed fabric six metres below the keel where a man’s body hung limp in the counter-current behind a maintenance ladder.
The youngster – judged to be between five and ten – was hypothermic yet alive. A stevedore had already swaddled him in a thermal sheet by the time rescuers climbed the slimy rungs. Cell-phone clips shot from the deck of a vehicle-carrier show the boy’s fingers locked round a rescuer’s harness like a seat-belt to life. Up on the quay an ambulance crew slid an oxygen mask over his face; pupils shrank sluggishly under a pen-light. “Stable but silent,” a paramedic told NSRI spokesman Craig Lambinon – words that cover anything from shock to elective mutism.
While medics worked, the police dive boat Inkunzi nosed alongside. A lift-bag, clipped to the adult by the remaining swimmer, rolled the body onto the bright-yellow recovery stretcher on Inkunzi’s aft deck. Sergeant Wesley Twigg, SAPS Western Cape’s press link, juggled two phones – one to the mortuary van, the other to detectives tasked with opening an inquest. A Metro EMS physician pronounced death at 08:02.
Port regulars accept occasional horror – Duncan Docks logs roughly one fatality a year, usually a stevedore crushed by containers or a fumigation tech overcome by phosphine. Yet the idea of a child in suspected murder-suicide jolted even hardened hands. WhatsApp chatter erupted before the scene tape dried: tourists who slipped snapping selfies; a father vaulting the cruise-terminal fence with a boy in his arms. None of it verified. Twigg will not yet confirm any family tie between the deceased and the survivor. Harbour Cluster detectives now hold CCTV clips and will marry them to Automatic Identification System plots to redraw every movement between 06:00 and 07:00.
Understanding how two people can vanish into a working harbour demands a glance at the layout. Duncan Docks forms an upside-down “L.” The long leg is the tourist-friendly 3 km Victoria & Alfred promenade, watched by cameras and private guards. The short leg is a cargo quay guarded only by a 2.4 m palisade fence that gets peeled back nightly for crane repairs or bent inward by homeless men who sleep between grain silos. At 06:30 the night gang knocks off and the day shift is still in the canteen; patrol density bottoms out. Throw in a 4.9 m spring tide and a 12-second swell and water slops quietly over the bottom rungs, erasing the sound of entry.
That same spring tide also saved the child. Fortnightly, sun-and-moon gravity piles an extra half-metre of ocean into Table Bay, spinning slow clockwise whirlpools inside the breakwater. A small torso, especially one buoyed by air trapped in a hood, can ride that lazy merry-go-round far longer than in slack water. Lambinon notes that a quarter-hour delay would have dumped the boy against a barnacle-crusted hull with a far darker result.
Drownings steeped in suicide are not unknown here. In 2019 a 34-year-old marine engineer set his hard-hat on the coping and disappeared; divers found him wedged in a bow-thruster tunnel fourteen days later. What catapults Thursday’s file up the chain is the presence of a minor, shifting the matter from a simple inquest to a potential Schedule 1 criminal investigation should culpable homicide or child abuse surface. Detectives will now chase next-of-kin, pull cellular tower dumps from the two closest masts, subpoena ride-hail data – both Uber and Bolt pick up 400 m away at the passenger terminal – and screen blood and vitreous fluid for ketamine or benzodiazepines, drugs sometimes employed to sedate children before water entry.
Business, however, detests a vacuum. By 09:00 a Maersk feeder ship had slipped its lines for Lagos, bridge officers either unaware or professionally incurious that a black body-bag had lain on the neighbouring quay sixty minutes earlier. Forklifts scuttled between piles of rooibos tea bound for Dubai. On the top deck of the cruise ship MS Nador, entertainment staff rehearsed a conga line for tomorrow’s influx of 3 000 German guests, music masking the sirens still fading on shore.
The episode, though, has already rattled procedure. Transnet National Ports Authority circulated an internal directive ordering every security contractor to run a “vertical integrity audit” of fencing before each shift change. Port chaplain Father Sipho Mthembu asked bosses for permission to hold an ecumenical blessing at the edge of Berth 5, a ritual last staged in 2005 after four grain-elevator workers burned to death. Whether stevedores will down tools long enough to pray is anybody’s guess.
At Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital the boy’s chart carries an unusual tag: non-accidental submersion with surviving minor. Guidelines demand a full skeletal X-ray series, retinal photography for haemorrhages, and a forensic interview once speech returns. Field officers have located at least one maternal uncle whose handset pinged near the harbour at 06:41; he consented to a DNA cheek swab. Until parentage is certain the patient is registered as “Baby December,” a shield against headline hunters.
Down on the docks the NSRI team hosed diesel sludge off fins and masks, coiled thirty metres of floating line, and logged thirty micrograms per litre of bunker-fuel on their neoprene – enough to earn a haz-mat dip. Someone set the child’s soaked trainers, laces tied together, on the dashboard of the rescue truck. They will stay there until the boy is claimed or moved to safe care, a quiet counter-weight to the compartmentalised amnesia that lets rescuers answer the next pager beep.
Investigators, meanwhile, guard the growing file: docket 134/12/2025, stamped PRIORITY – MINOR INVOLVED. Inside rest the first exhibits: a tug-cam still showing two silhouettes on Quay 5 at 06:38; a close-up of lime-green cotton; and a wristwatch halted at 06:53, crystal cracked but hands still ticking, as though even time declined to recognise the instant the harbour claimed one life and granted another.
On December 4, 2025, two figures were found in Table Bay Harbour. An adult male was found deceased, and a young child, though hypothermic, was rescued alive. This discovery initiated a major police investigation due to the involvement of a minor.
A long-shore worker spotted two shapes drifting in the water between a moored bulk-grain ship and the quay in Duncan Docks. Port control was alerted at 07:15, and rescue operations began shortly after.
The water temperature was 14 °C, and visibility was extremely poor due to diesel-stained silt. Rescuers, including NSRI swimmers, worked by touch alone. The child was found first, and the man’s body was discovered later, approximately six meters below the keel of a ship.
As of the initial reports, Sergeant Wesley Twigg of SAPS Western Cape could not confirm any family tie between the deceased man and the rescued child. Detectives are currently investigating to determine any connection.
The child, estimated to be between five and ten years old, was hypothermic but alive when rescued. He was taken to Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital and is registered as “Baby December” to protect his identity. He is undergoing a full medical examination and forensic interview as part of the investigation.
The incident has prompted Transnet National Ports Authority to issue an internal directive for a “vertical integrity audit” of fencing before each shift change. Port chaplain Father Sipho Mthembu has also requested permission to hold an ecumenical blessing at Berth 5, highlighting the unusual and serious nature of this event.
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